FRANÇOIS HOLLANDE, the new president of France, is the first to occupy the Élysée Palace with a live-in companion instead of a wife. The political journalist Valérie Trierweiler is pictured above at yesterday’s swearing-in. (Tiberge of GalliaWatch writes about the event here.) Mrs. Trierweiler still covers politics for a television network. She is twice married and twice divorced.

She has three teenage sons, who are now in the uncomfortable position of having a mother in a public relationship with someone other than their father. Concern for that kind of thing, however, is passé in France, where the whims of adults reign freely over the lives of children. Selfishness and superficiality are terribly enlightened to the French, who redesign the family while their culture fades into the night.

Mrs. Trierweiler, an attractive woman with a quintessentially French face, told the New York Times: “I haven’t been raised to serve a husband. I built my entire life on the idea of independence.” As we can see from her outfit yesterday, this independence entails a certain degree of sexual aggression.